Sacred Read online

  She squeezed my hand, and I looked in her face, saw a smile there.

  We entered the visitors’ foyer through a set of glass doors, came face-to-face with another set that was locked. To our right was a bank of nameplates. The nameplates bore three-digit numbers beside them and there was a phone to the left of the entire bank of names. Just as I’d feared. You couldn’t even do the old trick of pressing ten buzzers at once and hoping someone would buzz you in. If you used the phone, the person who picked it up could see you through a security camera.

  All those darn criminals have made it awful hard on us private detectives.

  “It was fun watching you get worked up out there,” Angie said. She opened her purse, held it over her head, and dumped the contents on the floor.

  “Yeah?” I knelt beside her and we began scooping things back into the purse.

  “Yeah. It’s been a while since you got worked up over anything.”

  “You, too,” I said.

  We looked at one another, and the questions in her eyes probably lived in my own right then:

  Who are we these days? What’s left in the wake of all the things Gerry Glynn took? How do we get happy again?

  “How many sticks of lip balm can one woman have?” I said and went back to the pile on the floor.

  “Ten’s about right,” she said. “Five if you gotta travel light.”

  A couple approached on the other side of the glass. The man looked like an attorney, sculpted salt-and-pepper hair and red and yellow Gucci tie. The woman looked like an attorney’s wife, pinched and suspicious.

  “Your play,” I said to Angie.

  The man pushed open the door and Angie moved her knee out of the way, a long strand of hair falling out from behind her ear as she did so, swinging down by her cheekbone and framing her eye.

  “Excuse me,” she said, chuckling softly and holding the guy with her eyes. “Clumsy as always.”

  He looked down at her and his merciless boardroom eyes picked up her gaiety. “I can’t walk across an empty room without tripping, myself.”

  “Ah,” Angie said. “A kindred spirit.”

  The man smiled like a shy ten-year-old. “Coordinated people beware,” he said.

  Angie gave it a short, hard laugh, as if his uncommon wit had surprised her. She scooped up her keys. “There they are.”

  We rose from our knees as the wife moved past me and the man held the door open.

  “Be more careful next time,” he said with mock sternness.

  “I’ll try.” Angie leaned into the words a bit.

  “Lived here long?”

  “Come, Walter,” the woman said.

  “Six months.”

  “Come, Walter,” the woman repeated.

  Walter took one last look in Angie’s eyes and went.

  When the door closed behind them, I said, “Heel, Walter. Roll over, Walter.”

  “Poor Walter,” Angie said as we reached the elevator bank.

  “Poor Walter. Please. Could you have been any more breathy by the way?”

  “Breathy?”

  “‘Sex months,’” I said in my best Marilyn Monroe voice.

  “I didn’t say ‘sex.’ I said ‘six.’ And I wasn’t that breathy.”

  “Whatever you say, Norma Jean.”

  She elbowed me and the elevator doors opened and we rode them up to the twelfth floor.

  At Jay’s door, Angie said, “You got Bubba’s gift?”

  Bubba’s gift was an alarm decoder. He’d given it to me last Christmas but I hadn’t had the chance to try it out yet. It read the sonic pitch of an alarm’s call and decoded it in a matter of seconds. The moment a red light appeared in the tiny LED screen of the decoder, you pointed it at the alarm source and pressed a button in the center and the alarm’s bleat stopped.

  That was the theory anyway.

  I’d used Bubba’s equipment before and usually it was fine as long as he didn’t use the phrase “cutting edge.” Cutting edge, in Bubbaspeak, meant it still had a few bugs in the system or hadn’t been tested yet. He hadn’t used the phrase when he gave me the decoder, but I still wouldn’t know if it worked until we got into Jay’s place.

  I knew from previous visits that Jay also had a silent alarm wired into Porter and Larousse Consultants, a security firm downtown. When the alarm was tripped, you had thirty seconds to call the security firm and give them the password, or Johnny Law was on his way.

  On the way over, when I mentioned that to Angie, she said, “Let me worry about that. Trust me.”

  She picked the two door locks with her kit while I watched the hall, and then she opened the door and we stepped inside. I closed the door behind me, and Jay’s first alarm went off.

  It was only slightly louder than an air raid siren, and I pointed Bubba’s decoder at the blinking box above the kitchen portico, pressed the black button in the center. Then I waited. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, come on, come on, come on…Bubba was pretty close to losing his ride back from prison, and then the red light appeared on the LED and I pressed the black button again and the air raid siren died.

  I looked at the small box in my hand. “Wow,” I said.

  Angie picked up the phone in the living room, pressed a single digit on the speed-dial console, waited a moment, then said, “Shreveport.”

  I came into the living room.

  “You have a nice night, too,” she said into the receiver and hung up.

  “Shreveport?” I said.

  “It’s where Jay was born.”

  “I know that. How did you know it?”

  She shrugged, looked around the living room. “I must have heard him mention it over drinks or something.”

  “And how’d you know it was his code word?”

  She gave me another little shrug.

  “Over drinks?” I said.

  “Mmm.” She moved past me and headed for the bedroom.

  The living room was immaculate. A black leather L-shaped sectional took up a third with a charcoal smoked-glass coffee table in front of it. On the coffee table lay three neatly stacked issues of GQ and four remote controls. One was for the fifty-inch wide-screen TV, another for the VCR, a third for the laser disc machine, and a fourth for the stereo component system.

  “Jay,” I said, “buy a universal remote for crying out loud.”

  There were several technical handbooks in the bookcase, a few Le Carré novels, and several by the surrealists Jay loved—Borges, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar.

  I gave the books and then the couch cushions a cursory once-over, found nothing, and moved into the bedroom.

  Good private detectives are notoriously minimalist. They’ve seen firsthand what the random jottings on a piece of paper or the hidden diary can lead to, so they’re very rarely pack rats. More than one person has said that my apartment resembles a hotel suite more than a home. And Jay’s place, while far more plushly materialistic than my own, was still pretty impersonal.

  I stood in the bedroom doorway as Angie lifted the mattresses on the antique sleigh bed, lifted the throw rug by the walnut dresser. The living room had been icy modern, all blacks and charcoals and cobalt-blue postmodern paintings on the walls. The bedroom seemed to be following a more naturalistic motif, the blond hardwood floor polished and gleaming under the small antique replica chandelier. The bedspread was hand-sewn and bright, the desk in the corner a matching walnut to the dresser and bureau.

  As Angie moved to the desk, I said, “So when did you and Jay have drinks?”

  “I slept with him, Patrick. Okay? Get over it.”

  “When?”

  She shrugged as I came over to the desk behind her. “Last spring or summer. Around there somewhere.”

  I opened a drawer as she opened its counterpart beside me. “During your ‘days of unleashing’?” I said.

  She smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Days of unleashing” had been what Angie called her dating ritual after she s
eparated from Phil—extremely short-term relationships with no attachments, dominated by as casual an approach as was possible to sex in the years since the discovery of AIDS. It was a phase, one she grew bored with far quicker than I had. Her days of unleashing had lasted maybe six months, mine about nine years.

  “So how was he?”

  She frowned at something in the drawer. “He was good. But he was a moaner. I can’t stand guys who moan too loud.”

  “Me, either,” I said.

  She laughed. “You find anything?”

  I closed the last of the drawers. “Stationery, pens, car insurance policy, nothing.”

  “Me either.”

  We checked the guest bedroom, found nothing there, went back to the living room.

  “What are we looking for again?” I said.

  “A clue.”

  “What kind of clue?”

  “A big one.”

  “Oh.”

  I checked behind the paintings. I took the back off the TV. I looked in the laser disc tray, the multiple CD tray, the tape port in the VCR. All were distinctly lacking in the clue department.

  “Hey.” Angie came back out of the kitchen.

  “Find a big clue?” I said.

  “I don’t know if I’d call it big.”

  “We’re only accepting big clues here today.”

  She handed me a newspaper clipping. “This was hanging on the fridge.”

  It was a small item from a back page, dated August 29 of last year:

  MOBSTER’S SON DROWNS

  Anthony Lisardo, 23, son of reputed Lynn loan shark, Michael “Crazy Davey” Lisardo, died of apparent accidental drowning in the Stoneham Reservoir late Tuesday evening or early Wednesday morning. The younger Lisardo, who police believe may have been intoxicated, entered the grounds illegally through a hole in the fence. The Reservoir, long a popular, though illegal, swimming hole for local youths, is patrolled by two Marshals of the State Park Service, but neither Marshal Edward Brickman or Marshal Francis Merriam noticed Anthony Lisardo enter the grounds or saw him swimming in the reservoir during thirty minute patrols. Due to evidence that Mr. Lisardo was with an unidentified companion, police have left the case open pending the identification of Mr. Lisardo’s companion, but Captain Emmett Groning of the Stoneham Police stated: “Foul play has been ruled out in this case, yes. Unequivocally.”

  The elder Lisardo refused to comment on this case.

  “I’d say that’s a clue,” I said.

  “Big or small?”

  “Depends whether you measure by width or length.”

  I got a good dope-slap for that on the way out the door.

  13

  “Who’d you say you’re working for?” Captain Groning said.

  “Ahm, we didn’t,” Angie said.

  He leaned back from his computer. “Oh. But just because you’re friends with Devin Amronklin and Oscar Lee of BPD Homicide, I’m supposed to help you?”

  “We were kinda counting on it,” I said.

  “Well, until Devin called me, I was kinda counting on getting home to the old lady, fella.”

  It had been a couple decades, at least, since someone had called me “fella.” I wasn’t sure how to take it.

  Captain Emmett Groning was five foot seven and weighed about three hundred pounds. His jowls were longer and fleshier than any bulldog’s I’d ever seen and his second and third chins hung down from the first like scoops of ice cream. I had no idea what the fitness requirements for the Stoneham Police Department were, but I had to assume Groning had been behind a desk for at least a decade. In a reinforced chair.

  He chewed a Slim Jim, not eating it really, just sort of rolling it from side to side in his mouth and taking it out occasionally to admire his tooth marks and slick spittle residue. At least I think it was a Slim Jim. I couldn’t be sure, because I hadn’t seen one in a while—since around the same time I last heard the word “fella.”

  “We don’t want to keep you from…the old lady,” I said, “but we’re sort of pressed for time.”

  He rolled the Slim Jim across his lower lip, somehow managed to suck on it as he spoke. “Devin said you’re the two who settled Gerry Glynn’s hash.”

  “Yes,” I said. “His hash was settled by us.”

  Angie kicked my ankle.

  “Well.” Captain Groning stared over his desktop at us. “Don’t have that kind of thing round here.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Your sicko killers, twisted deviants, your cross-dressers and baby rapers. No, sir. We leave that for all you in the Big City.”

  The Big City was approximately eight miles from Stoneham. This guy seemed to think there was an ocean or two in between.

  “Well,” Angie said, “that’s why I’ve always wanted to retire here.”

  It was my turn to kick her.

  Groning raised an eyebrow and leaned forward as if to see what we were doing on the other side of his desk. “Yeah, well, like I always say, miss, you could do whole lots worse than this here town, but not whole lots better.”

  Call the Stoneham Chamber of Commerce, I thought, you got yourselves a town slogan.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Angie said.

  He leaned back in his chair and I waited for it to tip, send him back through the wall into the next office. He pulled the Slim Jim out of his mouth, looked at it, and sucked it back in again. Then he looked at his computer screen.

  “Anthony Lisardo of Lynn,” he said. “Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. You ever hear it called that?”

  “First time.” Angie smiled brightly.

  “Oh, sure,” Groning said. “That’s a hell of a place, ol’ Lynn. Wouldn’t raise a dog there.”

  Bet you’d eat one, though.

  I chewed my tongue, reminded myself I’d resolved to work on my maturity this year.

  “Wouldn’t raise a dog,” he repeated. “Well. Anthony Lisardo, yeah, had himself a heart attack.”

  “I thought he drowned.”

  “He did, fella. He surely did. First, though, he had a heart attack. Our doc didn’t think it was so big it would have killed him on its own, him being a young kid and all, but he was in five feet of water when it happened, so that was pretty much all she wrote. All she wrote,” he repeated with the same musical lilt he’d used on “wouldn’t raise a dog.”

  “Anybody know what caused the heart attack?”

  “Well, sure, fella. Sure someone knows. And that someone is Captain Emmett T. Groning of Stoneham.” He leaned back in his chair, left eyebrow cocked, and nodded at us, that Slim Jim rolling along his bottom lip.

  If I lived here, I’d never commit a crime. Because to do so would put me in the box with this guy, and five minutes with Captain Emmett T. Groning of Stoneham, and I’d confess to everything from the Lindbergh baby’s killing to Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance just to get locked up in a federal pen, as far away as possible.

  “Captain Groning,” Angie said, using the same breathy voice she’d used on Poor Walter, “if you could tell us what caused Anthony Lisardo’s heart attack, why, I’d be much obliged.”

  Much obliged. Angela “Daisy Mae” Gennaro.

  “Cocaína,” he said. “Or yeh-yo as some call it.”

  I was stuck in Stoneham with a fat guy doing his Al Pacino-as-Tony Montana imitation. Life didn’t get much better.

  “He snorted cocaine, had a heart attack, and drowned?” I said.

  “Didn’t snort it. Smoked it, fella.”

  “So it was crack?” Angie said.

  He shook his tiny head and his jowls made a flapping noise. “Your standard cocaine,” he said. “Mixed in with tobacco. What’s known as an Ecuadoran cigarette.”

  “Tobacco followed by a hit of coke, followed by tobacco, then coke, tobacco, then coke,” I said.

  He seemed impressed. “You’re familiar with it.”

  A lot of people who went to college in the early to mid eighties were, but I didn’t tell him that. He struck me as the kind o
f guy who decided whether or not to elect presidents based on whether he believed they’d “inhaled” or not.

  “I’ve heard rumors of it,” I said.

  “Well, that’s what this Lisardo boy smoked. Had himself a groovy high going, man, but that high came a crashing on down in a real bummer way.”

  “Word,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Def,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  Angie’s heel ground into my toe and she smiled sweetly at Captain Groning. “What about the witness? The newspaper said Lisardo had a companion.”

  Groning took his confused eyes off me and looked back at his computer screen. “Kid named Donald Yeager, aged twenty-two. Left the scene in a panic, but called it in about an hour later. We ID’d him from a jacket he left behind, sweated him in the box for a bit, but he didn’t do jack. He just went to the reservoir with his buddy, drank some beer, smoked some mary jew wanna, and went for a dip.”

  “Did he do any coke?”

  “Nah. He claimed he didn’t know Lisardo was doing it either. Said, ‘Tony hated coke.’” Groning clucked his tongue. “I said, ‘And coke hated Tony, fella.’”

  “Terrific comeback,” I said.

  He nodded. “Sometimes when me and the boys get going in the box, there’s just no stopping us.”

  Captain Groning and the Boys. Bet they had barbecues and went to church together and sang Hank Williams, Jr., songs together and never met a rubber hose they didn’t like.

  “So how does Anthony’s father feel about his son’s death?” Angie asked.

  “Crazy Davey?” Captain Groning said. “You see in the paper how they called him a ‘mobster’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every corrupt guinea north of Quincy’s a mobster all a sudden, I swear.”

  “And this particular guinea?” Angie said, her hands locked together into fists.

  “Small-time. The papers said ‘loan shark,’ which is partly true, but mostly he’s a chop-shop guy on the Lynnway.”

  Boston is one of the safest major metropolitan cities in the country. Our murder and assault and rape rates are barely blips on the screen compared with those of Los Angeles or Miami or New York, but we have all those cities beat when it comes to car theft. Boston criminals, for some reason, love to boost cars. I’m not sure why that is, since there’s nothing terribly wrong with our public transportation system, but there you go.